Here are some of the take-aways from SAP Sapphire Madrid in May 2026, for us data professionals who are keen to learn more about how SAP is elevating data to its strategic pinnacle.

We’ve always known the importance of data so it was rewarding to hear the same impressions from the SAP leadership. The Business Data Cloud (BDC) featured prominently in the keynotes, showcasing its evolution into a robust, integrated business data fabric that enables the business value with contextual SAP and non-SAP data. . Announcements highlighted significant advancements in BDC’s semantic layer, promising unprecedented data quality and harmonization across diverse data sources – a critical enabler for reliable analytics and AI. We saw concrete examples of BDC streamlining data management and enhancing data governance, underpinning compliance and trusted decision-making, which is paramount for data leaders. During my Data Products presentation I highlighted the soon to be generally available Data Product Studio, a BDC toolset that expands data product search, enables the creation of custom data products and data product management. An exciting development is the use of AI agents to automate many of the data product management tasks, starting with data product creation.

Strategic partnerships were a major focal point at the Sapphire Madrid event.. SAP revealed expanded collaborations with leading hyperscalers, ensuring seamless, scalable data ingestion and secure infrastructure for advanced generative AI model training. Furthermore, new alliances with specialized AI firms were announced, designed to embed sophisticated, industry-specific AI capabilities directly into SAP applications, augmenting offerings like Joule. This emphasis on unified, governed data through BDC, coupled with a robust partner ecosystem for AI innovation, marks an exciting, data-driven future for the intelligent enterprise, grounded in trust and accessibility. As SAP expands its hyperscaler collaboration model it’s great to see announcements that truly underscored SAP’s commitment to flexibility, scale and leveraging best of breed infrastructure for its data and AI strategy. It wasn’t just about presence but deeper, more integrated capabilities with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The announcement of the Dremio and Reltio acquisitions, finalized shortly before Sapphire, brought cutting-edge data virtualization and semantic modeling platforms into the SAP fold. For a global data executive, this is crucial because it promises to accelerate the realization of a true business data fabric. It means we can logically integrate data from disparate sources – SAP and non-SAP, on-premise and cloud – without costly physical replication. These acquisitions will give our customers a governed, context-rich foundation for agentic AI, analytics, and business applications. Specifically, these new capabilities, aligned with the Business Data Cloud will significantly improve data lineage, ensure consistent data definitions across the enterprise, and provide a unified, trusted view of information critical for advanced analytics and AI, directly enhancing BDC’s capabilities and easing compliance burdens.

So, it was certainly refreshing to see data and AI take center stage at Sapphire and I’m confident that over the next quarters/before the end of 2026 we will see even more capabilities that enable SAP’s data and AI strategy: the release of new assistants and agents, more strategic partnerships and further evidence of SAP’s open data source approach.

What were your key Sapphire moments and takeaways as a Data Professional?

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